


To Be Handed Your Heart

by MountainRose



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Dragons, Fate, Gen, Trauma, flock marks, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4520784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainRose/pseuds/MountainRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is one flock, destined for great things, that has waited a long, <em>long</em> time to become whole. </p><p>AKA: OT5 with DRAGONS</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Be Handed Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> jadestrellas said: Poly-kinda? So everyone is given a blank dragon egg when they are six years old or maybe it just appears these eggs slowly change as the child ages until it hatches generally somewhere in the teens The dragons have flock marks but many never meet.

The dragon comes in the night. She is... Ancient, scales darkened to ebony, and riddled with scars even though they are as hard as glass.

Tony is five and notices none of this, all he sees is a great, benevolent shadow over his bed, his mother's dragon cooing comfort from the doorway. The ancient dragon hands him an egg, wrapped in tattered cloth. It's already dried, though Tony won't know the significance of that for years, and he handles it like it’s his own, naked heart. In some ways, it is.

She dies, right there in their house, and turns to shining black sand while Tony sobs into his egg.

\---------

Clint is six, to the day, when his egg arrives. It hardens slowly in his hands and he cups it carefully the whole time, so its shell will be perfectly curved. Barney had put his on a table, careful-like, sure, but it had a flat side 'cause he didn't have enough nesting stuff. Clint doesn't have a table, or any nesting stuff, only himself. So he holds it in his palms and waits, watching.

He never saw the dragon who laid it, and never thought to ask the strongman, who had, what she looked like. He would have told him that she was old, and dark like aged oak.

\--------

Natasha's twelve, emerging from the compound for the first time since her memories began, when an old dragon, dark brown and roughed up by the years, drops from the sky like she has been waiting.

The other girls, strung out along the fence, are the in same position. Their Waiting Mothers, the shining eyes beyond the fence, are finally allowed close enough to lay their eggs.

Yelena and four other girls all have the same Mother, and they sleep together, fight together, after that, but Natasha's lays only one egg. They sit together, she resting, Natasha holding her egg as instructed, until night falls, and the Mother sends her inside before the snow starts.

It's a magical day, but Natasha will never see her again; after all, everyone knows Waiting Mothers die after laying their clutch.

\----------

Bruce is alone in the park, playing hide and seek with his school class and hidden a little too well, when she comes, and the teacher smiles at him, and gives him an egg carrier.

The Mother thinks this object is hilarious, though she doesn't speak --her human is long dead, Bruce knows, and he cries for her despite the wonder of getting his egg-- and he tucks his soft, still wet egg into the cotton wadding, careful to make it stay round, careful to make sure his dragon will be comfy once it grows big enough to be cramped in by the shell.

The Mother stays with him until they catch the bus back to school; she seems tired and hungry, her ribs proud, but the teacher says Mothers don't eat, they just lay, and die.

Bruce cries into the scarred scales of her shoulder, and ekes out another five minutes together before she flies on to find his clutchmates and he has to go. She doesn't seem in a hurry though, and watches him clamber onto the bus from the top of the park gates.

\----------

Steve was sixteen, his mother dying, his own lungs threatening the same, when his egg finally appeared.

She was young, terrifyingly young, like she had been born after he was, and he sat on their ratty couch, his mother's dragon, Joe, speaking to her softly despite his own looming death, wondering what had happened to her human to make her lay so young. The laying itself is hard on her, and she falls asleep with her head on his lap, covered by Joe’s wing. He is alone, without a flock since the Great War, and his human is dying in the bed beside them, but he remembers what it is to comfort, and Steve's Egg Mother may as well be flock to Joe.

Soon, it’s not them comforting her, but her comforting them; Sarah takes her last breaths in the gray of early morning and Joe turns to sand, glittering darkly on the bedspread as the sun rises.

It’s a comfort that she stayed until she, _they_ died, and Steve sobs his long-awaited grief into her scales before she has to leave to find his clutchmates.

Steve is sixteen, and he goes to his mother's funeral with a still-soft egg waiting for him in his empty apartment, the only remnant of that moment where he felt not alone.

Seventeen, eighteen, twenty-one, and six years haven't passed by the time war breaks out. His egg hasn't grown, or quickened, through the shell has become a vibrant royal blue, and Steve follows a scientist into the bowels of New York with his egg, but without a dragon to tell him it's a stupid idea.

He hopes, lying frail and cold in the machine, that the serum will make him strong enough to see his egg hatch, but soon he's not thinking much of anything.

He tumbles out after, and in the chaos of an explosion and then the gunshots, he watches Erskine's dragon disintegrate into black sand while the man himself goes still under his hands.

After, no one will be able to tell him whether the shock-white stripe on his egg appeared because of the serum, or because of Erskine's death. Steve is scarred by both.

He drives the Valkyrie into the ice two weeks before the sixth anniversary of his mother's death, but as he goes down, he despairs that he wouldn't have seen it hatch, anyway; it is still as small and still as the day it was laid. He imagines that his dragon would have been the same navy and red as Peggy's, or had the virulent yellow flock mark of the core of the Howling Commandos, and it's a comfort as the radio mast breaks off the belly of the ship, and he ploughs into the ice.

Maybe, if it had hatched, it would have been big enough to catch Bucky.

His final act is to curl around the egg, carefully packed in an armoured pouch, and close his eyes tight against his death. There is no one out here to close them for him once he is gone.

\-------

Bruce's Betty hatches when he is twelve, her shell a vivid, emerald green and her wings small, delicate, and utterly beautiful. She immediately loves books, and can read out of the egg.

He’s in love, and it saves his life; she is the only part of himself that he can bear to like after the Hulk bursts into his life.

He doesn’t expect to ever deserve the flock she is marked for, so he puts off looking, and then, its moot anyway, and he _runs_.

\--------

Natasha’s Yasha grows large before he leaves the egg, and keeps growing, eating meat and men alike when they threaten his Natasha.

It’s an abomination, and it makes them so, so sick, but he does it anyway, because the Room likes it, and sends them after those who must disappear.

He is big enough to carry her away from them when the time comes, and he stops growing, smug and vicious and fiercely protective. Natasha doesn’t mind, not an inch, because she will never have to hotwire a car again, and the Red Room come to fear the red hourglass on Yasha’s belly.

More secret, hidden from their masters, is a silver-blue mark behind his ear that they will search for for the next twenty years.

\---------

Clint names his dragon ‘Lucky’, because no one tells him any better, and it is a good name for a dusky brown and cream creature that will be the fastest thing in the sky. Small, but deep chested, the size of a big dog, they sneak around like nothing else. Lucky’s smooth hide and mottled wings make him invisible at dawn and dusk, but they refuse to _thieve_ and _hurt_ , because they have a flock, somewhere, with silver-blue birthmarks, and he wants to _deserve_ them, when he finds them.

\--------

Tony’s egg hatches _quickly_.

He’s almost eleven, only five years after he got his egg, and he’s old enough to know that something is deeply, profoundly wrong.

He’s already at high school, in a year where everyone else’s eggs are hatching too, but he _skipped two grades._ He’s deathly afraid that Rhodey will die, that first night, he tries and tries to keep the ebony and blue dragon on the ground, safe, to get him to eat right.

But Rhodey is _fine_ ; he’s big and spindly and eats like a horse, and he can fly like a peregrine from day one. Tony relaxes slowly, over a week, a month, until people start whispering that his dad must have _done something, he made Captain America, right? What if, what if?_ Because Rhodey is huge, and Tony is tiny.

Tony punches someone, and they break a couple of his toes, it sucks.

Rhodey is big enough to carry him around, though, and the bully’s soul is the size of a puppy; he doesn’t keep his nerve for long, and Rhodey _keeps growing_.

Trips across town become a nightmare when Rhodey hits a tonne; he can’t fit into the store, and can’t ride the bus like a normal dragon. He’s relegated to the skies, with the military and police dragons, and they wonder if they shouldn’t sign up, just to be with people like them.

Howard looks at Tony, at the mess he’s made of a trip to buy a suit, and laughs. It rankles, and Tony gets the paperwork to train as a fireman, but god, Dad’s right, Tony would hate it. He builds a better S&R robot instead, and Rhodey laughs at him with Howard’s dragon, Jarvis. His dad’s opinions hurt less when they come straight from his soul.

In the end, Tony stops taking busses, and Rhodey builds a carrier, which becomes a saddle, which becomes a fashion item in about a month. Rhodey grows out of it a month later. He can’t fit in the shops, anymore, and he uses the tanoy to call Tony out of the stores when he lingers too long in the electronics section.

Rhodey is the sensible one: he eats enough, and doesn't drink. When Tony takes weed for the first time, it's enough for both halves of their soul, but Rhodey says Tony's idiot enough for both of them (he gets high on fumes anyway). Tony doesn't like it much --it slows him down-- and doesn't take it again. Cocaine, on the other hand...

Rhodey is furious with him, and carries him out of the party by his collar, but once Tony's safe in their workshop, the things he _builds...!_ He never takes as much again, but a few grains, here and there? It's not like booze, doesn't let him forget that he's sixteen on a dragon the size of a bus, or that his and Dad's latest joint project is a bullet that fragments into tiny knives when it hits someone. But it lets him finish the _work._ Rhodey remains semi-permanently furious with him, right up until the crash that kills his parents. Jarvis follows Howard into death, and Anna vanishes into the night, screaming, to lay her eggs.

By the time Tony is twenty one, by the time he’s alone, Rhodey has officially hit Cannon Class; he’s big enough to carry a car with passengers, or a whole artillery outfit. Tony only feels safe in the skies (the brake lines were _cut_ , why does no one _believe him!?)_ and Rhodey only feels safe with Tony in reach; he puts his claw down on the drugs, and on parties where Cannon Class dragons aren’t welcome.

The LA party scene goes upscale when they realise, but Tony doesn’t notice; he’s busy building the bombs his Dad always wanted him to. Obie takes over SI for a year, training him up, but by the end of it, he doesn’t want control of the money, as long as he has space to _create_.

They keep their flock mark secret, not that they _have_ one, but having it unknown keeps away fakers who would tattoo themselves silver-blue behind an ear. Tony wishes they hadn’t when a rocket hits Rhodey between the wings and he crashes into the sand.

Even being Cannon Class won’t protect you from a real flock, marks glinting in proud synchrony as they pour out of the sun, and maybe if he’d spread his mark far and wide, maybe he’d have a flock of his own to come to Rhodey's aid, but he's alone, the only flying dragon in the convoy, and they drag Tony kicking and screaming away from him while he bellows fire into the sky, furious and blinded by the sun. He's screaming Tony's name, cursing him for not riding with him, but Tony's voice doesn't reach him before the shrapnel in his chest silences him.

It feels like his heart is being ripped out of him, and it's not until Yinsen puts a battery in its place that he realises that that's _exactly_ what happened.

_Rhodey, please, come get me._

And of course, he does. The compound is on fire, and Tony is bleeding from a dozen places, but Rhodey's there to sling him into harness, and away. He doesn't remember the trip back, only the musky warm smell of Rhodey's hide, and the thumping of wings.

He doesn't find out that Rhodey's wing was broken by the rocket that sent shrapnel into his chest until two weeks _after_ they bring him back to Malibu, but Rhodey brushes it off, and yells at him some more. They argue, a lot. Rhodey believes with half their soul that they should make a weapon that can defend convoys like theirs, while Tony's half is sick with death and the zip of bullets.

Fights turn into running from each other, turns into a broken heart.

Tony's slow decline towards death... He tries to fight it, but he knows he can’t back down, and Rhodey _will_ come around, but he's heartbroken, and mad with loneliness... Once Rhodey forgives him, carries him home, he realises that the creeping sense of death clawing at his throat is _poison_ , and Rhodey is furious all over again, that they didn’t notice, that their stupid fight cost Tony so much time, but a meeting with Fury puts them back on track, and Rhodey does some of the most precise fire work that anyone has ever attempted. The new reactor burns whiter, cooler, and Tony feels like Rhodey has installed a sun in his chest. It’s awesome.

Rhodey demands a new Gatling gun and arc reactor powered repulsors, and they're good again. Iron Man and War Machine fly together, but this time, Tony has his own ride, and they can get up to twice as much mischief.

Distantly, watching two bright spots on their radar, Fury snorts sparks, and Maria throws up her hands helplessly. Fury is small enough to command the helicarrier from the helm, but his billow of smoke and sparks still elicits rumbles of irritation from the other crewmates on deck.

\------

Steve is found crusted over with ice, and curled around a freshly hatched dragon. It's a fire breather, glowing like a hot coal, and _alive._

He wakes up while they're pouring heat into him, and Steve wakes up not long after.

The first thing he does is sob when his eyes open to meet the other half of his soul, staring back at him. He smothers tears into a growl, and swears at--

"Sam. You're Sam. You-- oh God, you look just like your mom."

They tell him it's been seventy years, and Sam says... He remembers it, all of it. He was in the shell, not deaf; he heard seventy years of slow, ice deadened heartbeats, where his soul's vibrant life had sat.

Sam is the only thing that keeps Steve together those first few weeks, because the dragon’s nightmares wake him up before his own can.

\---------

When Loki shows his face, he's shocked that the man who greets him is a dragon. One eyed, canny and cantankerous, Fury belches fire after this 'god's' retreating back, and then has to flee before he's buried.

Loki has Clint, and Lucky is incandescent with rage, left behind. It doesn't matter what the WSC thinks, Fury is going after that soulless bastard with every resource he has. There isn't a dragon on that council, bastards, not even the council members' own souls are allowed to listen in. (His human, Maria, doesn't mind, she trusts his judgement, but still, he tells her everything when the blast doors open.)

Fury has one card to play, just one, and he sends Tony Stark a picture taken from behind and above Sam Rogers;

A tiny silver-blue circle, with an A slashed through its centre.

Rhodey. Lucky. Yasha. Betty. Sam.

A flock, just in time to save the world.

 


End file.
